Subsidies and grants

In the years 1996-1997, The National Library was awarded a special-purpose grant by the Czech Ministry of Culture for the scanning of its catalogues and making them available in the "graphic" format. Thanks to the grant, all the major NL catalogues were scanned, and, in the following years, made available to both on-site and off-site users. Because scanning can be done very quickly (in the NL, e.g., 20,000 cards of the General Catalogue of the Universal Library Holdings were scanned per day) and its costs is about one tenth of the cost of full retrospective conversion (about 2.50 Kè per card, today even 1 Kc for scanning compared with about 25 Kè for full retrospective conversion, the price varying according to the size and quality of the pre-conversion as well as the post-conversion records), offering access to scanned catalogues is a good method of making large catalogues available in a short period of time.

Providing access to scanned catalogues for on-site NL clients

In 1997, scanned catalogues were made accessible to NL clients within Clementinum. That step marked a significant progress in opening NL catalogues to all users without any limitations. The General Catalogue of the Universal Library Holdings, which is the most comprehensive "map" of our library's holdings, had previously been accessible to a selected group of users only. The first user interface was very much like the "traditional" catalogue.

Providing access to scanned catalogues for off-site NL clients

In the following years, scanned NL catalogues were also made available to off-site clients through the Internet by means of KATIF